Books like Muscling Through

When my husband and I got together, everyone said it wouldn’t work.

He graduated from the University of Texas while I was from University of Nebraska. At the time the schools were rabid football rivals. Both of us were avid fans. And the year we got married, the two schools played each other for the championship.

Is it any wonder I wrote about a metro-male and a good-old-boy? Not only do I write about mismatched couples, I read about them too.

In Tigers and Devils, a top Australian football player and the head of an independent film festival are attracted to each other. You don’t have to know anything about Australian football to enjoy this book.

Kennedy’s sense of humor and the main character’s married couple friends will make you believe even if you don’t have my background and haven’t had decades with your spouse.

Without my glasses, I’m functionally blind. Without his hearing aids, my husband struggles to hear. We shouldn’t work as a couple. Or are our limitations our strengths?

In Kaye’s book, Patrick Stanford is considered by his rotating crew of housecleaners to be an unreasonable client. Until Jake Manning is hired, no one realizes that Patrick as a blind man needs his house to be kept in strict order or he harms himself just walking from room to room.

Although Patrick has a PhD while Jake has barely a high school diploma, what matters is how they understand each other’s needs and work to answer them.

(An aside: Besides, how could I pass up a book in which Pat (my name) and Jake (my husband’s name) fall in love? I couldn’t!)

My husband and I met in the newsroom at the Houston Post newspaper. On paper, I guess you could say we had the same job: writing for the newspaper.

But like Lawson Gale and Jack Brighton in this book, both of whom work to preserve the environment, our jobs weren’t the same at all. He was a political reporter while I was an arts reviewer. We have completely different passions.

When lepidopterist Lawson travels to Tasmania to find and protect an endangered butterfly, he’s escorted by Parks and Wildlife officer Jack and his Border collie. I’ll admit I wasn’t very excited to read this book, but did because a friend said it was “good”.

Since I have almost no interest in endangered butterflies and environmental problems, I was hoping for “goodish mediocre”. What I got was brilliance. The book is funny, suspenseful, playful, and romantic.

The bottom line is even… show more.

This book resonates with me for a lot of reasons. The first is that I was married to a gay man before I met my current husband. Friends said his being gay would break us up, and they were right.

One of the protagonists in Reed’s book is a gay man married to a woman. So I was anxious to see what Reed, a gay man who was once also married to a woman, would do with this.

Secondly, I taught in a community college where many of my students had dropped out of school because they’d been bullied like one of the key characters in this book. One of the first essays the first year students were asked to write was a self-examination.

Many of the formerly bullied students wrote about how traumatic high school had been and how they felt unlovable because of it. My first published books… show more.

I was completely hooked by this book from the very first page.

The idea of a spoiler leading to an enemies-to-lovers story with two new housemates—a college student and a football player—was a fresh take on a tried-and-true trope.

I also loved how the story tackled a bi-awakening storyline with such care and authenticity—I’m picky about this trope, and Becca Steele nailed it with Liam. The emotional journey for both characters had me reading this book in one sitting (well after my bedtime), and the ending completely blew me away.

I was completely captivated by the relationship in this book and how their romance unfolded.

I loved that the author wasn't afraid to dive deep into both characters' vulnerabilities, which made their connection feel incredibly real—and well-earned.

It's an emotionally rich story that left me with a smile on my face.

As befitting the cheeky title, this book – about what it means to be, and to become, a gay man – is incisive, erudite, and a lot of fun to read. A pioneer of queer theory (and with this intervention, I suspect, a renegade from it), David Halperin is an unapologetic camp. He challenges received wisdom about how gay sensibility supposedly is misogynist, passé, irrelevant or dead, and his reflections on everything from Joan Crawford’s pizazz, to the current state of gay marriage, vacillate between being capacious and withering. “Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people” he sniffs at one point, dispensing a delightful, and typically barbed, aperçu.

The world of The Sea of Stars is amazingly creative; a modern setting that flawlessly incorporates magicians, scheming courtiers, enchanted animals, and prophetic astronomy in an age of cell phones, animal activists, and labor agencies. The majority of common people are ruled over by nobles and magicians who regularly strip human beings of their souls and lock them away inside animals, thus creating a soulless human workforce as well as intelligent animal servants. As weird as that may sound, the characters are so well written that the book is astoundingly humane and moving.

I sympathized completely with Grand Magician Zachary Drake in his disdain for the ruling class and its dehumanizing practices. Though, I’ll admit, a couple of times I was so fascinated by the unexpected creativity of the world that I almost wanted to see more. And I definitely appreciated Drake’s snark and cynical commentary.  

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I love finding a great new book, and then realizing it’s only the first in the series of many, many more!

A cross between queer romance and Golden Age detective fiction, I love being drawn into the charming English university setting with each novel and curling up to find out how the two professors are going to solve a cozy murder while falling even deeper in love.

Will there be punting on the Cam? Shakespeare puns? Edwardian-era tailoring? Yes, yes, and yes!

I’m a gay writer living in France, so of course, I had to read The Stuffed Coffin when it won France’s national 2019 Prize for Gay Thriller. And as a bonus, it’s set in Greece, the country which stole my heart long ago.

After breaking up with his boyfriend, Damien needs to get away and chooses a bucolic Greek village next to the sea. His first night there, he falls for a handsome youth, Nikos, but their relationship is anything but simple.

Meanwhile, bodies start appearing: drowned, run over, whatever. It’s hardly the calm respite Damien envisioned but readers will definitely enjoy this sometimes-quirky and definitely entertaining read.